Chris ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ Dillow asks five questions. Here are my answers; number two is the best. I’ve put Chris’s questions in italics. 1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average [...]

The Rt. Revd. and Rt. Hon. The Lord Carey of Clifton, formerly the Archbishop of Canterbury, is opposed to kinky sex. That doesn’t just mean he doesn’t want to partake of kinky sex; he doesn’t want anyone else to partake either. Writing in the News of the World1, George Carey comments on the fall-out of [...]

Sunny Hundal asks a couple of interesting questions over at Pickled Politics; should a no-platform policy with regards to the BNP be continued and should that it be extended to groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir? By way of a background, I understand a no-platform policy (in the instance of the BNP) to mean that no-one from [...]

I am glad that Rowan Williams has condemned the attacks on homosexuals in Nigeria and the death threats against the Rev. Colin Coward, director of Changing Attitude (an organisation that campaigns for acceptance of LGBT people within Christianity). You can read copies of the death threats here. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the condemnations from [...]

The Rt Rev Joseph Devine, Bishop of Motherwell, has come out with some particularly putrid comments. According to The Scotsman (via New Humanist via Stroppy) and the BBC, the Bishop has said “It is ever-present at the service each year for the Holocaust memorial, as if to create for themselves the image of a group [...]

Dhimmitude is a pejorative term that refers to people in the West who, in the opinion of users of the word, are guilty of surrendering to Islam. Islam, it would appear by reading the profferings of people who use the term, is the greatest evil out there and it seeks to insist that all non-Muslims [...]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is in trouble over his comments on the incorporation of Sharia law into UK law. It is my opinion that Dr Williams’ suggestions deserve reasoned consideration; that they do not require a change in the nature of the law; and that much of the opposition to them, implicitly, [...]

Matt Wardman links to a particularly good cartoon blog, ASBO Jesus. It’s worth taking a look. I really like this one: For me, it’s about God being an artifice, while, looking at the other cartoons, I suspect that the artist is thinking more about people ignoring God (which I think the artist believes to exist) [...]

God must be an awfully insecure sort. God, Christ, Allah, YHWH or whatever you call1 the Supreme Being, seems, for something that is all-powerful and all-knowing, to being using the slander laws (or, as they are in this case, the blasphemy laws) an awful lot lately. I think the right of freedom of speech includes, [...]

The implications of the failure of the attempted Christian Voice blasphemy action could be really rather wide-ranging. Firstly, it hamstrings the blasphemy laws which are, in and of themselves, incompatible with freedom of speech and are superseded by the Religious Hatred laws. It seems increasingly unlikely that any prosecution could be brought under the provisions [...]